Barbara Eden is 94 years old, still acting, still taking meetings, and still posting her old genie pose on Instagram to nearly 130,000 followers. She has spent sixty-five years in Hollywood and worked with almost everyone. And when interviewers ask her about the six weeks she spent making a Western with Elvis Presley in 1960, she keeps circling back to the same point, more forcefully every year. He was a genuinely good actor, and Hollywood wasted him.
The film was Flaming Star, and it is nothing like the Elvis movies most people picture. Directed by Don Siegel, who would later make Dirty Harry, it is a dark and violent Western about racism on the Texas frontier.
Elvis plays Pacer Burton, the son of a white rancher and a Kiowa mother, hated by both sides and slowly torn apart by it. The role had originally been written for Marlon Brando, and Montgomery Clift and James Dean were also considered before Dean’s death. Elvis sings exactly two songs in the whole picture, both near the beginning, and then acts. Critics have called it his finest dramatic performance, better even than King Creole.
Barbara Eden Tells How Elvis Was A Gentleman On Flaming Star Set
Eden, who was 29 and playing Roslyn Pierce, watched him do it up close and has never wavered in her assessment. “He was a fine actor,” she told People. “It was a part that required good acting, and he did it, boy.” She has also said the thing that clearly frustrates her most: “I just think people didn’t recognize or appreciate what a fine actor he was, and a lovely, lovely man.”
The details she remembers are all small ones, and they are the best part. He was always on time, which she pointedly notes leading men frequently are not. He had no huge ego sticking out. Between setups, while the crew fixed the lights, he would take out his guitar and sing, sometimes joined by his father and friends who came to visit the set. And there is one habit that clearly stayed with her for six decades. Whenever she arrived on set after him, Elvis would go and fetch her a chair. As she put it: “Actors don’t do that. You can sit on the floor, they don’t care.” She has also been careful to say, plainly, that there was nothing romantic between them, unlike several of his leading ladies.
Barbara Eden interview about “I Dream of Jeannie,” Elvis Presley
What they did do was talk, constantly. Eden was two years into her marriage to actor Michael Ansara at the time, and Elvis was fascinated by the marriage. He wanted to know how two working actors kept a marriage going in Hollywood. Her answer was refreshingly unromantic. “Look, this is our job. This is how we make a living. It is a job, acting.” She told him that as long as the two of you stay a team, it works out. In passing, he mentioned a girl he had met while stationed in Germany, adding that he was not sure because she was “awfully young.”
Eden has since said she had no idea at the time quite how young Priscilla Beaulieu actually was.
Then the film came out and something depressing happened. It flopped. Not because it was bad, but because Elvis fans were angry that he barely sang in it. The studio’s response tells you everything: they went back and shot an extra scene purely to get a guitar into it, with Eden, in her words, “hopping around the table.” She says she did not make a penny from the picture.
Which brings you to the verdict she gave Entertainment Weekly this summer, at 94, and it is the sharpest thing she has ever said about the business. Of the studio executives who handled him: “I think all they did was use him to get the money. They didn’t think about his career or how talented he was — my God.”
She saw him one last time years later, slipping out between her own Las Vegas shows still wearing her stage beads, to watch him perform. “It gives me goosebumps, even now, to talk about it.” And on his death, in 1977, she is blunt. “What a waste of a beautiful human being and a talented one.”